According to the Associated Press, when writing a scholastic journalistic piece, we (journalists), are not supposed to use the “Oxford comma” when writing items in a series. Otherwise: “I went to the store to buy milk, bread and eggs.”

Today, 3/11/13 I took a NYS DEC exam , the misspelling , grammar and punctuation was so horrific that I failed the exam costing me hundreds of dollars and my pride. I quickly made the test proctor aware of the situation . But nothing can be done now.

Today, 3/11/13, I took a NYS DEC exam. The spelling, grammar and punctuation were so horrific that I failed the exam and lost hundreds of dollars and my pride. I quickly made the test proctor aware of the situation. Nothing, however, can be done now.

If you can’t get the “spelling, grammar and punctuation” right, how can you judge others’ as “horrific”?

In the ‘Than’ example, is it sepposed to be a lesson? or another joke. The example actually means “I’m much better at holding my liquor than holding a panda bear”.
The correct sentence for the desired meaning should be “I’m much better at holding my liquor than a panda bear is.”

No. In my dialect, the default assumption for sentences of construction “Adjectiver at Verbing Noun1 than Noun2” is that when Noun2 refers to a person as opposed to a place or a thing, then it refers to a subject to which a comparison is being made. The previous sentence already established that the panda is a subject capable of drinking liquor, so I would actually have to put Verbing on both sides of the “than” in order to say what you claim this sentence already does.

(Also, I’m totally making this up; which is fine, because you’re denying the legitimacy of pre-assumed resolutions to common forms of syntactic ambiguity.)

If you strongly prefer the complete absence of all forms of syntactic shorthand, might I recommend a lovely little language labelled Lojban?

You never end a sentence with a preposition. Sometimes that can be a very tricky thing. Try writing a paper without the use of the words would, could and should; as those are really meaningless filler words according to my literature professor, he made us rewrite any paper that contained those words. (Prior to taking his class, that last sentence might have read: he would have made us rewrite any paper that contained those words. ) when I say they are filler words, note that the word “would” added no actual meat to the sentence other than an add 2 extra words to that sentence). Take an average of 5 sentences in a paragraph, and one filler word assuming 2-4 prepositional phrases/words or adjectives required to go with that word unnecessarily. A 200 count essay can easily amount to a minimum of two paragraphs of filler text.

Eliminating those three little words, makes writing an essay insane; it definitely made me a better writer -I guarantee nothing from a mobile phone after I’ve taken my sleepy night night medicinel

Why are you laughing about time? Oh, your intended message was misunderstood due to your lake of punctuation. I guess getting your point across accurately using written communication doesn’t really matter, does it?

lol omg when you try to get a job down the line and you start every sentence with lol omg no punctuation and text speak…
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT
I’ve never yet met anyone with a worthwhile job who can’t string a correct sentence together.

In olden times, when I was a copy editor, there was no such thing as an “Oxford comma.” Editing took a lot longer, and you didn’t have second chances because corrections in proof were expensive. Yes, boys and girls, I was a child of the waning hot- lead era. Almost all newspapers used the AP stylebook. A rule of thumb was to use a comma where you would pause when speaking, or where necessary for clarity. Better to leave in an unnecessary one than to leave out a necessary one. We didn’t lose any sleep over it and I don’t remember any arguments. Writers would write, I would edit, end of story.

I respect you, printing is such a dying art form). I can read backwards and upside down thanks to setting type. Running an old letterpress was fun back in my younger years. We even had an old windmill.

Course typesetting and design is what I got into, though my degree had to be mass comm /journalism.

People used to say printing was altogether going to disappear thanks to the Internet, but I can’t see that, product packaging will always exist, and there are some that will never give up the feel, smell or security of physically holding a book

No, Uncle Jack is his name (hence the uppercase for uncle; not normally a proper noun), so it would be
“Jimmy helped his Uncle Jack off the horse.” Otherwise it should be “Jimmy helped his uncle, Jack, off the horse.”